Home & Garden Columns

It’s a little off the gardening track, but who could resist a title like Flower Confidential? Actually, anything by Amy Stewart would be hard to resist. Her previous book, The Earth Moved, was a quirky introduction to the world of earthworms, touching on the giant worm of the Willamette Valley (three feet long and lily-scented) and Charles Darwin’s late-in-life fascination with worms (his long-suffering wife Emma played the piano for them; they were unresponsive).  

Flower Confidential (306 pages, $23.95 from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) is maybe not all that quirky, but still a great read. A cut-flower aficionado, Stewart sets out to trace the travels of flowers from breeder to grower to auctioneer to florist to your table. For many of them, it’s been a long strange trip. 

Stewart, a semi-local writer (lives in Humboldt County and writes for the San Francisco Chronicle) introduces a few semi-local characters, like the famously eccentric breeder Leslie Woodriff who created the ‘Star Gazer’ lily; and Lane DeVries, the current head of Sun Valley, the growing operation that marketed it.  

But most of the action is overseas. Cut flowers are now a major Third World export commodity, with Colombia, Ecuador, and Kenya leading the pack. Stewart visited several growers in Ecuador (Colombia being a bit dicey these days), where working conditions and health and safety regulations are much different from California. 

Those gorgeous super-roses—“the floral equivalent of a Tiffany diamond, all polished and carved and styled to perfection”—have hidden costs. 

Flower Confidential isn’t quite a horticultural follow-up to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, though. Stewart seems almost as disturbed by what she encounters in the Netherlands, where she has been escorted through the Dutch-efficient Aalsmeer auction by a public relations person who confesses to being sick of flowers. At a company called Multi Color Flowers, she meets the Holy Grail of breeders, the blue rose: “Actually, it’s hard to compare this blue to any color you’d find in nature. It was more of a Las Vegas blue, a sequin-and-glitter blue. A blue you’d find in nail polish or gumballs, but not in a garden.” The blue rose, of course, has had a dye job. 

Stewart meets the flower inspectors of Miami airport, an unsung part of the Homeland Security task force; talks to upscale florists in Manhattan and street-kiosk vendors in Santa Cruz; and speculates on the future of the industry; she’s intrigued by a small chain called Field of Flowers that aspires to be the Home Depot of the cut-flower world. In an epilogue, she witnesses the Valentine’s Day rush at a flower shop in Eureka.  

In the end, you’re left with mixed impressions. What the global cut-flower industry does is remarkable, and so is the amount of jet fuel it burns in the process—and we’re not even talking about chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Critics of the American Way of Food have been talking about “food-miles”: the distances traveled from farm to plate. It might also be useful to think about “flower-miles.”